1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to communication apparatuses, and more particularly, a communication apparatus for decoding electronic mail, converting the electronic mail into speech, and outputting the speech.
2. Description of the Related Art
Today, electronic mail or email has become an indispensable medium for daily information transmission, and are being used for various purposes and in various ways. Recently, electronic mail has been used in home communication terminals and cellular phones. This trend will continue in view of increasing uses of electronic mail by commercial services and governmental services.
The increasing usage of electronic mail, however, has caused an increase of junk mail distribution of advertisements or the like to a large number of people similar to junk phone calls. In order to receive electronic mail, in some cases it is necessary to dial up an access point of an electronic-mail distributing service. In this case, a charge arises for the reception of electronic mail. This has caused a serious concern for dealing with junk mail.
Furthermore, when compared with ordinary phones, devices having electronic mail capabilities require users to perform complex operations to select and browse a desired electronic mail or to filter out junk mail. This has inhibited active utilization of e-mail, particularly for users who wish to use e-mail but who are unfamiliar with such devices or who have disabilities such as weak eyesight. In view of such needs, attempts have been made to improve ease of operation for communication terminals used at home. For example, one device decodes and converts received electronic mail into audio information for output. This allows a user to hear email messages. In another device, as a countermeasure against junk mail, a user is able to set the device, based on sender information, keywords, or the like, to reject email from a mail distribution server or to limit output of already received email.
However, for these devices, a user must perform special operations in order to set the devices to reject distribution by a mail distribution server, to set whether a received electronic mail is to be read, to set whether a selected email is to be read, and so forth. Furthermore, the content of the setting is complex, such as a sender's mail address or a keyword. Thus, prior to a registration operation, a note must be taken of information that is needed, or an electronic mail including the sender's mail address or keywords must be printed in advance. That is, preparation for registration is laborious. In particular, in the case of apparatuses with input devices that do not have rich functions, such as home communication terminals, special and complex input operations are needed. This has been a considerable obstacle for users who are not familiar with the apparatuses. Furthermore, since the usage status of the apparatus changes in time, changes to the settings could frequently occur. For example, a new condition is added or removed for reading electronic mail. This frequently causes complex setting operations or registration operations described above, imposing considerable burden on users, such as time for changing the setting.
Furthermore, in a communication apparatus having limited memory to store setting information, information that has once been registered is maintained without being updated, even when that information becomes obsolete due to a setting change. For example, when an attempt for a new registration is rejected due to a limitation in the number of sets of registration data, information that is no longer needed must be searched for and deleted. This has imposed a considerable burden on users to confirm and delete obsolete setting information.
Furthermore, whether or not to perform audio output is determined based on a mail address of a sender, a keyword, a date, or a combination of these items. Thus, for example, in a home communication terminal, it has been difficult to control audio output at unspecific timings and under various situations, such as when the user is not at home and automatic answering is activated, when automatic answering is activated although the user is at home, and when the user is asleep and output of any operational sound is prohibited.